Loyalty
by Complicity
Summary: Rule number one: Trust. It has to be in this job. It has to be.
1. Ray

**A/N. Evening. A snippet of sorts, post the end of the series. Written in the first person from Ray's POV. Not very good at first person I don't like the way it steals my poetic licence so critical analysis would be appreciated very very much! Am still writing Asphodel Fields too, but the show itself has been slowly killing my inspiration for it, bad times. More soon though hopefully. I love all of your reviews by the way, so thank you. x**

Loyalty.

Rule number one: Trust. It has to be in this job. It has to be.

I'm kneeling on the cracked concrete ground with her head on my lap. My knees are damp and my right foot is twingeing vigorously in protest at the uncomfortable angle. It hasn't been right since it got trapped in that bastard door. I'm leaning over to press my hands into her stomach but it's not doing much good. There's a hell of a lot of blood seeping through my fingers and it won't stop no matter how much I want it to. At least my body's sheilding her face from the first signs of rain that are spitting icily upon the back of my neck. Not that she'd notice; she was out pretty quickly. Almost as soon as she hit the floor her eyes had closed and now she looks so peaceful, white as snow and so unaware of the panic surrounding her and my ragged breathing hovering above her.

Shaz is the only other figure strewn across the floor with us, wildly shouting her name and gripping her hand fruitlessly. She's bloody useless, it should be a comfort but I wish she wasn't here. For some inexplicable reason I find that I don't want anybody else here, I want to stay like this and hold her until the ambulance gets here and I don't want anybody else in the sodding way. Mostly, I want _him_ to leave. I haven't caught his eye since we heard the gunshots and appeared on the scene, and I don't want to think about the gut wrenching shock of the sight before us. It's rolling over and over in my head and I'm trying so hard to comprehend what must have happened but the way I see it, the conclusion is always the same. The Guv, statuesque, his pistol still smoking redundantly in his right hand and his mouth forming a small shocked o at his actions. Two bodies; one lifeless, and Drake, groping frantically for the ground beneath her and staring straight back at her boss with a look of terrific horror in her eyes.

Another one bites the dust. Chris doesn't have it in him, I should have seen through that. I trusted the Guv. I trusted him like he trusted Harry Woolf and if a fact had his seal of approval it was a fact. The wedge between him and Alex was one too far. We only get the end of conversations, you see, when we hear the raised voices and she storms madly from his office. We only know that he swore blind that she was bent and he made a promise to take her down. None of us believed any of it for a second. It was eerie, like when you first ask your Dad something he doesn't know the answer to or you watch him make a mistake for the first time. Alex Drake is many things, but she's not bent. Black is not white. We were never going to fall for this one.

He hasn't said anything at all. He's just standing there, rotten to the core, staring at us, blood on his hands. No, sod that, blood on my hands. That's what makes me really angry. I've committed myself to this force, to him, and he has no right to tear it all down around us. My fists have clenched into an angry plug upon Alex's stomach and I can't will myself to unclench them. I'm a coiled spring. Every element of every muscle is tensed in rage and I suddenly fear that any wrong movement would cause me to explode, to crush the body I'm cradling so protectively like a fallen glove. I've done everything for him. The Guv says jump.. a drink, a punch, a kick, a shot, respect your DI, leave Manchester. A command. No responsibility, just orders snapped in a moment. Mush. Then Drake came along. She smashed his philosophies to the ground. A letter penned in a purposeful scrawl, an explanation for everything that she stands for. Directions and unwanted advice, arrogant cow. I hold her more tightly if that's possible, and I could swear I see her smile.

A touch to the shoulder makes me flinch protectively, I didn't even hear the siren, and it's only as I stand and let the medics get to her lifeless form that I realise how heavy the rain is, and how much blood is on my jeans. He hasn't moved, and I find myself facing him, staring levelly back into his eyes as a human being. A regular man behind a big black coat and a few meaningless letters. The man with the gun in his hand. His expression changes, and when he speaks it sounds strangled and odd.

"Jesus. You think I meant it."

"You did it. You shot her."

I watch as my body flies into action. I don't know how I make the ground between us before my blood soaked fist makes contact with his chest. Something solid connects with my knuckles, a hip flask or a lighter, but I don't feel the pain as my hands beat wildly into his soft torso. I think he's on the ground by the time they pull me off him, barely defending himself and staring blankly into the sky.

_And now the party must be over, I guess we'll never understand._

_The sense of your leaving, Was it the way it was planned?_


	2. Gene

**A/N: Ooh, thank you for the reviews! I enjoyed them so much that this one-shot has been niggling away at me and turned itself into a trilogy, huzzah. Aussi, yep I did borrow Queen for the italics ;) & the song is No one but you. x**

Gene.

Gene Hunt lets the door to the private hospital room click shut ever so gently. He takes a quick scan of the quiet corridor behind him before shutting the blinds, glad to see the bloody useless copper that's guarding the door is fast asleep with his helmet resting forward across his eyes. Once satisfied, he creeps forward to the chair by her bed and takes up his position.

First, he opens his mouth to speak but finds himself completely devoid of anything to say. Annoyed with himself, he leans forward to brush a stray curl from her closed eyes before taking a deep breath to start again. A heartfelt, 'sorry' that catches in his throat. He hates the way her right arm lies lifelessly by her side, skin with a deathly pallor, punctured by needles and tubes. He grips tightly onto the tips of her icy fingers and closes his eyes. Mostly, he hates that he did this to her.

The words come thick and fast and they burn his throat, anything would be better than this. Bloody hell, he wishes he could cry.

"Right Bolls, listen up. These bastards in white coats ain't holding out much hope for you at the moment, so you're just going to have to bloody well prove them wrong and wake up. Come on, you're good at that, proving everybody wrong.

"What, you, you want me to bargain with you? I'll pay off your tab in Luigi's, eh, what do you say to that? All the Bolly your bony ass can handle. Or, I'll let you use your psycho - babble without taking the piss? Christ Bolls, you can have my balls on a silver platter if you'll only bloody speak to me again!" He checks himself there, wary that his voice is raising in volume and taking another quick glance in the direction of the door, not once letting go of her hand. He sighs.

"Who am I bloody kidding, you've already got that. How is it, Drake, that you've gone and got yourself so far under my skin, wrapped my team around your little finger, without me even sodding noticing. You know, you've ruined me. Everything was ticking along just fine, then suddenly every bloody officer on my team looks up to you more than me. I've been doing my homework these past few days, you know. All these secret lines of enquiry for every pissing investigation this past year. You did that, you made them care about responsibility and getting it right. Now, you could click your fingers you know, and they'd turn against me like a bloody army. How did that happen, hmm? How did that happen.

"They all think I did it on purpose, you know. The whole lot of them, even Ray. Especially Ray. So there you have it; My balls, swinging back and forth from your mantelpiece next to the candelabra. I'm damned either way, you see:

"If you don't come back to us, then I'll never see daylight again. Not sure I'd want to, think I'd go the way Hitler did. That'd be bloody appropriate. If you wake up, and you tell the bastards the truth, we'd be in for a very large drink on them. But then you'd be back on my team and I'd be damned all over again. Only just beginning to realise it Bolly, but we're in pieces without you. Might as well have me on a lead. Hell, maybe this is your world you batty cow. Come back to it Bolls, it doesn't work without ya."

_And so we grace another table, And raise our glasses one more time._

_There's a face at the window, And I ain't never, never sayin' goodbye._


	3. Shaz

**Love, Hugs, and sorry about the delay. Final snippit to round it off...**

Shaz.

Whilst everybody else turns away, I turn to face you. Why? Where did I learn that from?

The dimly lit trattoria is almost silent this afternoon, as I step carefully and purposefully down into its murky depths. No music. I guess Luigi's sensed the mood. Sure enough the room is empty, save for one solitary figure looming over the bar. There's a bottle of whiskey by his side that he reaches for periodically, his shoulders drooping more with every gulp. I wonder why he doesn't turn around when he hears my shoes clopping down the stairs, if he's savouring that moment where he can convince himself that I'm her, perhaps.

I take a pew next to him, unsurprised that the movement still doesn't cause him to acknowledge my presence. I wonder if that's the first bottle? I don't ask. I reach into the pocket of my denim jacket, Chris' jacket, and pull out the crumpled scrap of paper that's compelled me to find him. His eyes flick across the distance between us as he sees what I'm now flattening out in front of me, but he's resigned to a lack of any further surprise that I found it.

"Thass' not for you." He gestures grimly, too drunk to poke his finger in my direction.

"You're lucky I'm the one who found it."

"Na. Not lucky. Rest of those dimwits couldn't find their own ass crack."

"None of them shot DI Drake." I'm not sure why I said that. Callous, stupid, foot-in-mouth whisper. The pain behind his eyes is as obvious as my guilt is instantaneous, and I stare intently at the paper in front of me to avoid his glare. A scrawl, opportunistic yet carefully considered, left scrumpled and pressed into Alex's right hand.

_I'm sorry. Good luck._

"No. Thass' right Granger. Bloody bastard, thass' my legacy. Cop killer bastard." He punctuates each beat with a clunk of his glass against the surface of the bar, letting it slide from his grip and skid a few inches out of reach upon the last _'bastard'_. He glares at the thing then, only looking away to make a grasp for the bottle, accidently knocking that away as well. I sigh inadvertently as I watch it roll over and over itself noisily, eventually coming to a begrudged standstill a few feet down the bar from us.

"So you just run away? Before you even know if she'll be okay? Coward." I don't mean to be so blunt, actually I don't know where this is coming from at all. I guess it's hard to be afraid of a broken man. He turns towards me, and stares levelly into my eyes then, holding my gaze for long enough to make my cheeks flush. "Was she bent?" It just comes out, my mouth has a habit of running faster than my brain in any circumstance but I really can't help wanting to know the answer to this one. At first, along with the rest of CID, I'd dismissed the Guv's outrageous claim. Except that, these things have a habit of playing on the mind, and I couldn't help but wonder. All the times she'd enlist my help to run off on her own line of enquires, then all this Boris Johnson stuff. It had all started to make sense and the more I'd thought about it, the more used I'd felt.

The Guv breaks my gaze then, and bangs his fist down so hard upon the bar that I jump. "Bloody Hell, what's happened to my team?" What has happened? After all we've learnt and after everything that's changed since last year, now we're in tatters. Suspicious of each other, hiding, treading on eggshells, torn apart. What would you do, Ma'am, if you could see us now? I reach for the whisky bottle, still lying dormant upon the bar just within my grasp, and I pour the Guv another large measure before taking a generous swig myself.

Rule number one: Trust. It has to be in this job. It has to be.

_Another tricky situation, A get to drownin' in the blues._

_And I find myself thinking, Well - what would you do?_


End file.
